


All Things Go

by perfectlystill



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 23:57:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3308024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlystill/pseuds/perfectlystill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She does not want to be soft, and she does not want to forgive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Things Go

Raven volunteered for this.

With each footstep she thinks: _I volunteered for this_. 

Her leg hurts now, but she doesn't say anything. She can hear the crush of leaves under her foot, but she can't feel the ground beneath, even as her entire body tilts forward with the slant of it. She focuses on walking, one foot in front of the other, and she does not slow down or complain. She keeps her eyes on the dirt, the patches of moss and the heels of Clarke's boots in front of her. When they first left camp, Raven focused on the back of Clarke's head, the little braids, looking more and more like Lexa's every day, the sunlight glinting off the blonde, the waves slipping past her shoulders. The problem with this was it made Raven feel soft and forgiving. It made her think about braiding Clarke's hair the way her mother taught her in a rare moment of lucidity and kindness.

She does not want to be soft, and she does not want to forgive. 

She doesn't know why she volunteered for this. 

Maybe because the metal of the ark had begun to feel cold and suffocating. Maybe because she wanted a break from fixing things other people broke and from solving problems other people couldn't. Maybe because her eyes had started to hurt with the strain and her hands had begun to cramp. 

Whatever her reasons -- and really, Raven has never been good at keeping secrets from herself, that's more Clarke's territory, so she knows it's a combination of all of the above and of missing the girl, a sort of loneliness she remembers when Finn was in lock-up and she had to wait for visiting days -- she's here.

She keeps walking and ignores the pain shooting up her thigh. She concentrates on the little ball of anger in her chest when she thinks about Clarke and her knife in Clarke's hands. She thinks about how this scouting mission is the last thing they need to do before they bring Mount Weather down and their people home. 

Raven knows she's not essential to this mission, that Clarke is doing the scouting and that someone else should've gone with her. Anyone else should've gone with her, someone who was going to invade the mountain and not sit at the radio. Lexa, if she wasn't busy -- Raven doesn't know what she's busy with, and she doesn't care. There's an anger toward Lexa similar to the one for Clarke burning in her chest. The difference is Raven spends almost no time thinking about Lexa. When she does think of her, her hands curl at her sides and she feels like she'll start crying again.

Raven blinks when Clarke stops, almost skidding into her. Her legs feel wobbly, almost the same way they felt after a spacewalk, when she'd come back onto the ark and place her feet on the ground. Raven looks up and squints into the setting sun. 

"We need to find a place to stop," Clarke says. 

"I can keep going."

Clarke glances over her shoulder. Her face is harder now. There's a cruelty to the set of her jaw, and Raven doesn't know if it's come with the choices Clarke's been making, or if it's reserved for Raven. "It's not about that."

"What's it about, then?" Raven asks.

"We're in no man's land. Lexa said there should be another clan hunting tonight, and they won't be kind."

Raven reaches for her gun. 

Clarke keeps walking. 

They settle inside a cave-like structure, cracks in the rock and dirt above filtering in moonlight. Raven sits on a relatively even piece of ground and begins taking off her brace. She wants to rub at the withering muscle and the curve of her knee, but she doesn't want Clarke to take it as weakness. She's tired and her lower back is sore, but her mind buzzes. She wonders if Wick is fucking everything up, and she almost wants to call into camp to check in, but it'd be a waste of the walkie-talkie's battery, and he wouldn't cop to fucking everything up anyway. She thinks about Bellamy, the low and comforting crackle of his voice over the radio. He'd made her laugh, and it had surprised her. She misses him, too.

Clarke sits opposite Raven, hand on the small gun she lays on her thigh. "You should get some sleep. I'll keep first watch."

"I'm fine," Raven says. 

Clarke looks at her, eyes cold and mouth turned down. She waits a beat before closing her eyes, fingers still on her gun in way that cannot be safe. 

Raven picks at the dirt underneath her fingernails and tracks the minuscule shifts in light breaching the cave. When the wind picks up, it gets cold. Raven pulls her jacket tighter and tries not to shiver. Earth does not keep its warmth much better than the metal of the ark, and Raven remembers Finn offering her an extra blanket during a maintenance check that shut off the heating to their station. 

She keeps remembering good things about Finn. She wishes she didn't. She wishes she was the kind of person who didn't turn her only family into a martyr, who didn't ignore every mistake he made in death. But she's not. Because Finn was her only family, and if she doesn't remember the good things about him, no one will. No one else knows the good things, not the way she does. She remembers, and that's a burden she'll carry for the rest of her life.

When Clarke opens her eyes, Raven's looking at her -- through her. 

Clarke tilts her head and looks up at the ceiling. Raven blinks and averts her gaze.

"You could talk to me," Clarke says. 

"I don't have anything to say to you."

Clarke moves her gun, folds her knees and wraps her arms around her legs. Raven can feel her stare. "You could apologize."

"Apologize?" Raven scoffs.

"Yeah. Apologize."

"I don't have anything to apologize for."

"Really?" It's Clarke's turn to scoff.

Raven looks at her again. She's cast in shadow, one streak of moonlight cutting her face in half. Her eyes are bright and angry, and Raven thinks that's such bullshit. The fire in her chest warms. "You killed Finn. You _lied_ to me. And I swear, if you say you did what you had to do, or something about the greater good, I will-"

"I saved your life," she says. 

"What?"

"I saved your life, Raven." Clarke's jaw pops and her eyes are low. "I saved your life, and you've been treating me like shit ever since. Yes, I did what I had to do. Yes, I killed Finn so he wouldn't be tortured to death, so we wouldn't all be tortured to death, but I saved your life, Raven. You."

Raven shakes her head. "I understand, Clarke. I'm not an idiot."

Clarke's nostrils flair and she starts: "Are you-"

" _I'm not an idiot_. I know Finn would've been tortured, that you would've been killed if you did what I asked. But you lied to me, Clarke. You took my knife, and you killed the only person I have ever loved. I trusted you." Raven bites her bottom lip until it hurts, until she can imagine the phantom taste of blood on her tongue. "And ever since you've been acting holier than thou. Like you know best and everyone else just has to listen."

"I saved your life," Clarke says, like a stutter or an echo, quiet.

"I don't have to be grateful."

Clarke straightens her legs. There's a wrinkle in her forehead and something akin to feeling -- sadness and empathy -- in the creases around her eyes. She's aging quickly down here; the wrinkles aren't permanent yet, but they will be. "It's not my fault. He gave himself up. He took my choice. And you blame me. I feel it, all the time, how much you blame me." Clarke looks down and picks at a loose thread. "I fucking hate you for it."

"I fucking hate you, too," Raven says. 

The words are sour, but not untrue. She hates Clarke. She hates Clarke for taking her knife instead of giving it back, and she hates her for killing Finn, and she hates her for befriending Lexa, because Raven has seen them around camp, and that's what they are, they're friends. She hates her because, like with Finn, she can remember the good things. She remembers Clarke's gentle hand on her forehead when she had the virus, and she remembers when Clarke's orders had sounded like belief and faith instead of commands. 

"Lexa asked me about you," Clarke says. She looks up, but her head is still bowed. 

"I don't care." Raven uses both her hands to pull her leg up and begins massaging it, because she doesn't care what Clarke thinks it means anymore, either. They must have walked a few miles today, and she's not used to it.

"She said she was confused, because at first it didn't seem like we were friends." 

Raven rolls her eyes. "I wonder why. It's not like you were willing to let me die to keep the peace or anything."

"Raven," Clarke sighs. 

"Clarke," Raven mimics. 

Clarke presses her mouth together, her chest rising and falling like she's re-calibrating her breaths. "She said that when I talk about Bellamy, it's clear that I trust him. And then she said I never talk about you."

"Surprise." 

"She asked me why, when you're so important to the mission. She asked me why I didn't trust you."

Raven looks at Clarke, and Clarke closes her eyes, exhaling. 

She looks small like this, Raven thinks, on the verge of folding into herself and giving up. She won't. Clarke isn't built that way, and Raven wouldn't let her.

She wonders about the last time Clarke cried, and she wonders if Clarke cried for Finn, or for Bellamy, or for her.

"I trust you," Clarke says. "And I only trust like-" she laughs humorlessly, "I only trust like three people."

"Lexa?" Raven asks. 

"Not like I trust you."

Raven swallows. 

She can feel herself soften.

She has put so much effort into being angry, into channeling that anger toward fixing the radio and helping Bellamy dismantle the acid fog, into figuring out how to blow up Mount Weather while saving the children inside. She has thought about what those children will think when their parents are dead and they're alive. Raven knows a lot about being a kid whose parents are dead. She knows what that anger is like, too.

Still, she can feel some of her rage slip out between her fingers when she looks at Clarke.

"We're never going to agree about Finn," she says.

"I know." Clarke wipes at her eyes even though they aren't wet. "Will we be able to get past it?"

Clarke bites at her lip, and Raven wants to say no. She wants to say the fire in her chest is always going to hurt, that she is always going to look at Clarke's hands and see the stain of Finn's blood. She wants to say that this is the one thing she doesn't know how to get over. She wants to say she understands what Clarke is doing, and she wants to thank her for avoiding the emotional manipulation Raven can see churning in her mind, words that would make Raven feel guilty. 

"Maybe."

Clarke nods. "Maybe." She doesn't smile, but her face loosens. She starts to look a little more like the Clarke Raven used to know. "Lexa had said that she understood, when I told her I trusted you. She said it was commendable of me to try and distance myself from a person with the power to break me."

"Break you?"

Clarke shakes her head. "Nevermind."

"Tell me." Raven drops her leg and lets her heel scrub along the ground. It barely leaves an indent in the dirt. "You owe me that much."

"Because I love you," Clarke says, the words a quick breath. Clarke looks at her legs, smooths her hands over her thighs and frowns. 

"Oh." Raven almost asks if this is emotional manipulation, too, but she knows it is. She also knows that doesn't make it a lie. "Okay."

"Sorry." Clarke swallows and looks up. "Can I ask you something?"

Raven shrugs. Sleep is starting to tug at her eyes, her skin going clammy and tight from exhaustion, the weather, and nothing else. "Sure."

"Why did you volunteer?"

Raven leans back against the wall and looks up at the ceiling. Light has stropped streaming in. "Because I missed you."

Clarke nods. "Thank you," she says, recognizing the kindness there. It could be Raven's own brand of emotional manipulation, but that has never been her angle. "You should try and get some sleep. We have a long day tomorrow."

Raven decides not to protest.


End file.
